These days as pretty much everything has some level of support for rendering emoji, do we really need to offer our own small set of smilies? We've already shown that it isn't enough by having to add the [ heart][/heart] tag when we could just have replaced the smilies picker with a selection of useful emoji. I'm pretty sure the heart tag literally ends up rendered the same as the basic heart emoji, too, just with the text colour changed to red and the size increased so that the line spacing gets messed up. In fact, our normal smilies seem to adjust line spacing by an amount. As an experiment, the left one is the heart tag, and the right one an actual emoji (but recoloured and enlarged to match).❤❤

As another experiment, I'm going to sign off with a more complex emoji that was actually introduced as an emoji rather than being recycled from a naughtily designed codepage. This should demonstrate that the forum already supports it.